>Staffup Weekend put the lie to Stein’s pronouncement. As Nicholson later wrote me, “The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive, because the participants are people who show up and see things through.”
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.
(How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?)
Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad, even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been an option)
This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of events.
My first real job interview in 1999 worked exactly like this. A pool of candidates came in and were given the same 2 day coding assignment. We were paid for our time and worked on site. It was a great experience, but I tend to like working on interesting problems (which I guess is a valuable trait in itself).
It especially made sense at this company because they were using an obscure coding platform and needed to train everybody from scratch. So you were actually learning the language a bit while performing the test. Mentors went around and asked you your thought process as you worked an gave some helpful nudges.
I did get the job and to this day it was the best office environment of my life. I wish all tech companies were as well run as that one.
I'd happily do that type of interview as two days of money coming in is still great in its own right when you're unemployed.
Plus it seems like an utterly fair way of evaluating candidates that I don't really feel like trick questions, riddles, and high pressure whiteboard challenges accomplish.
One question/concern I have is: How much paperwork is involved in paying someone for just two days? For example, do you now need to file tax stuff (both state and federal), and how do you physically pay them (e.g. set up bank transfers, cash, etc)?
In an ideal world you'd just have people in for two days and hand them a small wad of cash at the end. But with the laws on the books and complexity of employment in general, something tells me the overhead of such a thing would be problematic.
I think the law is that if it's a contract job and you get paid under something like $500 you don't even need a W2 form (or whichever one it is for that). That might vary state-by-state.
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.
Totally agree. Sounds like each applicant should be getting paid or something. Even so, dropping the rest of your life for two days stinks.
You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them.
You know, there should be an app for that. Something where you can just put in everything, and then when sending out one resume to a particular company, it would help you customize it for them.
Maybe you could feed in the job ad, and the app uses some fancy NLP to then select which topics you should emphasize on your resume.
It should also keep track of what version you've sent out to whom, so that you can view it when talking to the potential employer on the phone.
Agree! I am tempted to show up with my 18 month old and have him run amok :)... or better still have the others take care of him while I show off my coding skills!
To be fair, that's not a self-contradictory position. It is quite possible that there could be a lack of qualified programmers, while employers are flooded with applications from unqualified programmers. The obvious solution to that problem is, of course, for companies to spend the time and money on training.
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.
(How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?)
Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad, even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been an option)
This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of events.